Minimalism in Art: From Malevich to Contemporary Artists

Minimalism: From Revolutionary Russia to Today

The origins of minimalism can be traced back to the Russian artists of the revolutionary period, particularly through movements like Constructivism and Suprematism. A prime example is White on Black (1917) by Malevich. At first glance, minimalist works may appear simple, but ambiguities complicate their perceptual reception, making them reflexively complex. This contradicts Morris's assertion that "what you see is what you see."

Key Figures and Their Perspectives

• Greenberg viewed minimalism as innovative, mistaking it for bizarre, strange effects rather than recognizing the essential qualities of art, particularly its exploration of three-dimensionality.

• Wollheim saw minimalism as having a minimum of artistic content, characterizing it as an art of dismantling rather than execution.

• Foster believed that minimalism, through its pure forms, allows for the transcendence of the subject-object duality. However, he acknowledged the complexity arising from the fact that perception is subject to particularities, requiring space and time for the works to be fully present and captured at a glance.

• Rosalind Krauss challenged the modernist approach while also contradicting its idealist model of consciousness due to its attack on anthropomorphism and illusionism. She saw minimalism as a return to, and the height of, modernity.

• Michael Fried considered minimalism a threat to the very definition of art. He argued that art is a conceptual problem with modernist roots, linked to science and religion. This radical revolt against the status of the art object allows for the idea of painting and sculpture to evolve. In minimalism, all parts of a work retain their individual value within the whole.

Artists and Their Contributions

• Donald Judd emphasized that while his compositions are not specified, his objects exist in three dimensions, which are real space. This eliminates the problem of illusionism and the limitations of the literal space of painting. The simplicity of the work does not necessarily equate to the simplicity of experience, as unified forms do not reduce the ordering of relations.

• Morris believed that the gestalts in minimalist works are more contingent than ideal.

• Sol LeWitt's use of trellises becomes obsessive in its logic.

• Larry Bell's cubes, though closed, still reflect the outside world.

Minimalism signifies a renewed interest in the body, not in anthropomorphic form, but in the presence of objects themselves.